[Review] OCZ RevoDrive 80GB

Introduction:

Solid State Drives are becoming faster and faster. With the advent of the SandForce controller, drives quickly started maxing out the capabilities of the SATA 3 Gbps interface. A quick fix was doubling the speeds SATA operates at and along came SATA3 operating at 6Gbps. Most motherboards have included SATA3 ports for about a year now, although only since P67 have they been native solutions on Intel motherboards. For AMD, SATA 6Gbps has been natively supported since SB850 debuted, however AMD storage controllers are generally not as strong as the Intel native solutions. The only other options to get 6Gbps speed was via a controller card or 3rd party chips mounted on the motherboard.

There is another way to get SATA3 performance with out the need for SATA3 ports, or the “performance tax” associated with the new interface. Running two SATA2 SSDs in RAID0, can give you a massive performance increase of up to twice the performance in reads and writes. There are drawbacks to running RAID0. Novice users might not understand how to correctly setup a striped array on their drives. The drives can not be swapped between PCs of differing architectures without losing all of the data. Lastly, performance will vary depending on the controller that is used, and Intel ICH10 versus a SB850 or a Marvell 91xx chip will all have different results in performance in reads or writes and even access time can be effected.

Along comes OCZ with a product that provides SATA 6Gbps performance at SATA2 pricing, with all of the ease of installing a peripheral card and powering up the system.

The Revodrive series of SSDs are PCI Express-based controller cards that contain all of the components of two solid state drives and ties them together with a Silicon Image RAID controller chip. Install the card into your PC and see transfer speeds of up to 540 MBps reads and 450 MBps writes (350 MBps sustained write) without batting an eye or mucking about in the BIOS. 4K aligned performance is in the 70,000 IOPS range. Different size drives offer slightly faster or slower read / write and IOPS performance. A full break down can be found on the Revodrive specifications page at OCZTechnology.com

OCZ Technology:

Founded in 2002, San Jose, California-based OCZ Technology Group, Inc. has built on its expertise in high-speed memory to become a dominant player in the manufacturing and distribution of solid state drives (SSDs), a disruptive, game-changing technology that is replacing traditional rotating magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs). SSDs are faster, more reliable, run cooler, and use significantly less power than the HDDs used in the majority of computers today. In addition to SSD technology, OCZ also offers high performance components for computing devices and systems, including enterprise class power management products as well leading edge computer gaming solutions.

OCZ became a household name building DRAM modules for enthusiasts over the last few years, and has branched out its name to other products, including CPU coolers, power supplies and even a “touch less” game controller that uses facial movements and brainwaves as a game controller. Recently, however, they have moved from producing DRAM to focus their memory experience solely on building Solid State Drives.

The Package:

Like most of their quality products, OCZ went the extra distance in creating a very sophisticated and tasteful product package. The Revodrive comes in a simple cardboard box that conveys the nomenclature and advertising features in a muted color scheme.

Flashy colors and ridiculous claims just are not needed when a product will be sought after by name. Opening up the fairly standard cover style card board box reveals another box with nothing but the R for Revodrive and a simple “PCI Express Solid State Drive” in white lettering running across the front and back. To say that the packaging is ‘understated’ would be an understatement.

Sliding out the insert, we can see the box is cut to fit the shape of the Revodrive card. The card of course comes packaged in an ESD bag, however it was removed for the pictures. The packaging foam is cut out to fit the card and provides excellent protection and looks good doing it.

Written by Neuromancer

7 Comments

There is one thing that was left out of the discussion, which is prablboy the dominant reason why performance expected varies from performance experienced in the 802.11n world. Aggregation.Our company makes the world’s only 802.11 traffic generator/analyzer that is made specifically for testing wireless networks, and we’ve tested all the units referred to (or their close cousins), and can demonstrate data rates on those access points well above the 200 Mbit/sec mark. It turns out there are three dominant determining factors that can easily be observed, once you test the network with test gear that exceeds the capability of the network:1. How much aggregation is the AP providing, and capable of accepting? Getting to 270 Mbits/sec is possible only when using 1518 byte frames, and aggregating 43 MPDU’s per AMPDU. Aggregating fewer MPDU’s into an aggregated frame means the number drops quickly.2. Frame length. There is a maximum number of packets/second each AP can handle, regardless of length. If you can keep packet lengths up near 1500 bytes, you’ll see big throughput numbers. If you are sending frames less than 100 bytes or so, you will observe a maximum packet rate beginning to be the limiting factor.3. How the AP handles frame loss. It is true that there will be RF interferers. However, the protocol is actually quite adept at dealing with lost frames and retransmitting them. But, if, in the process of aggregating, the AP does not do a timely job of retransmitting lost frames in the next AMPDU, the client has to buffer more in order to reorder frames correctly. With 802.11n, not handling even low levels of frame loss has compounding effect, because loss in one AMPDU rolls into the next AMPDU.While it is true that MIMO requires appreciable multipath to work effectively, that doesn’t keep 802.11n from delivering on a great deal of its promise just by having laptops close to the AP. Keep in mind that dropping to one spatial stream (MCS7 and below) will still give you 140 Mbits/sec of media capacity, requiring absolutely no multipath. It does require channel bonding (40 MHz) and short guard interval, though. The bottom line is that RF interference rarely turns out to be the thing that prevents the high numbers.Note that this discussion is all about how the network side of the equation works. If the client card does a poor job in any of these categories, the network may be wonderful but your net performance will be limited by the slowest member.That’s why we created to the product we have to give these manufacturers a way to separate the two variables: client and network and measure/stress the network accurately.Tim Bennington-DavisVP of EngineeringVeriWave, Inc.

Such an amazing set of Read and Write Number. Borderline increadible at 450 mbs read and writes in the high 3 hundreds.. This is a wonderful solutions for Server and Enthuisist builds.. Amazing.. Just Amazing.